1991 massacre of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops was part of
U.S. 'total war'

From Mike Buckingham, 8 Febuary 2003

It was like going down an American highwaypeople were all
mixed up in cars in trucks. People got out of their cars and ran
away. We shot them.... The Iraqis were getting
massacred.Pfc. Charles Sheehan-Miles, describing March 2,
1991, assault on retreating Iraqi column at Rumaila, Iraq, two days
after cease-fire in Gulf War.

We've blown away a busload of kids.Unidentified
platoon sergeant during March 2 assault.

We're yelling on the radio, 'They're firing at the
prisoners! They're firing at the
prisoners!'Specialist 4 Edward Walker, describing
February 27, 1991, incident during ground invasion of Iraq.

It's murder.Unidentified U.S. soldier during February
27 attack.

BY MAURICE WILLIAMS Washington's assault on Iraq was one of the
biggest slaughters in modern history. The six-week bombardment that
began in mid-January 1991 and the 100-hour ground invasion unleashed
on February 24 killed an estimated 150,000 people. Millions were
homeless and exposed to hunger and disease, as large sections of the
country were left in ruins. The murderous effects of that war are
still felt today, reinforced by the ongoing economic embargo and
continued bombing attacks against Iraq.

Despite attempts by the U.S. government to lie and cover up the truth
about its massacre, some of the facts have come out over the years.

An extensive article in the May 22 issue of the New Yorker magazine by
journalist Seymour Hersh has exposed more facts about Washington's
slaughter in the Arab-Persian Gulf.

Washington seized on Baghdad's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990
to launch a war aimed at overthrowing the Iraqi government and
installing a regime subservient to U.S. imperialism. In pursuing these
goals the U.S. capitalist class sought to gain an edge over its
imperialist rivals in Europe and Japan, bolster its domination in the
Middle East, and gain greater control over the oil reserves in the
Gulf. The U.S. rulers also used the war to tighten their military
encirclement of the workers state in Russia.

Washington, however, did not achieve its political aims in the region.
They failed to overthrow the Iraqi government. They have proven unable
to crush the Palestinian struggle for a homeland. Instead, there is
more volatility and instability in the region and today the Israeli
government, its junior imperialist partner in the region, has been
forced out of Lebanon.

The February 1991 U.S.-led ground invasion of Iraq was a one-sided
slaughter, not a war. The capitalist regime in Iraq, headed by Saddam
Hussein, did not organize a fight but simply tried to maneuver with
Washington. Baghdad abandoned the mass of workers and peasants in
Iraq's army on the battlefield of Kuwait and southern Iraq. As
these ex-soldiers tried to flee back home, the U.S. military machine
simply massacred tens of thousands of human beings. The U.S. invading
forces suffered barely a handful of casualties, mostly from
friendly fire.

Hersh is a liberal journalist who gained a reputation for his
investigative reporting on the 1968 My Lai massacre of Vietnamese by
the U.S. military. For the New Yorker article, more than 300
interviews were conducted with U.S. army officers in the Gulf war and
army investigators.

Hersh focuses mainly on events after the cease-fire announced by U.S.
president George Bush on Feb. 28, 1991, in particular the operations
directed by one of the top commanders of the Gulf War, Gen. Barry
McCaffrey. The article quotes U.S. army officers and soldiers who
describe several instances of Iraqis being killed as they tried to
flee or surrender or even after they had given themselves up as
prisoners to the U.S. forces.

Hersh views these massacres simply as an excess of war. He
doesn't challenge the premise of Washington's bipartisan
assault on the Iraqi people, and so doesn't dwell much on the
brutality unleashed by Washington before the February 28 cease-fire,
which Bush proclaimed because he believed that by then the U.S. forces
were on the verge of achieving their goals.

Nonetheless, even the limited facts presented in this article are an
indictment of Washington and shed light on the character of its
assault.

McCaffrey, who commanded 26,000 troops of the 24th Infantry Division,
drove his forces more than 200 miles into Iraq to block the retreat of
Iraqi soldiers from the war zone in Kuwait. Abandoned by their
military leadership, they offered no resistance.

Killing of hundreds of fleeing soldiers We met the enemy,
recalled 1st Lt. Greg Downey, describing an encounter on February 25,
the second day of the ground war. They were a sad sight with
absolutely no fight left in them. Referring to the fact their
leadership had stranded them, he added, The hate I had for any
Iraqi dissipated.

After the cease-fire was declared, the retreating Iraqis had been
assured safe passage. Many had thrown away their weapons. Tanks were
loaded on trucks with their cannons aimed to the rear. Some of the
tanks were in travel formation, and their guns were not in any engaged
position, said Sgt. Stuart Hirstein of the 124th Military
Intelligence Battalion.

On March 2, deep inside Iraq, a five-mile-long retreating column of
Iraqis approached the causeway across Lake Hammar, near the Rumaila
oil field west of Basra. They ran into the U.S. forces McCaffrey had
deployed right across the line of retreat. McCaffrey ordered a
devastating attack. The U.S. military forces sealed off the causeway
with Apache attack helicopters and artillery fire, pinned the Iraqi
column on the road, and pounded them for five hours with wave after
wave of bomb, tank, artillery, and missile attacks.

At least 400 Iraqis were killed. Some 700 Iraqi tanks, armored cars,
and trucks were destroyed. Among them was a bus with civilians and
children that was hit by a rocket. No shots were fired at the U.S.
forces, and there were no serious U.S. combat casualties.

No reporters were allowed in the area at the time. During the Gulf War
no media representatives were permitted on the battlefields without
military escorts.

The massacre of unresisting Iraqis and the deaths of children deeply
disturbed many U.S. soldiers. One platoon sergeant remarked,
We've blown away a busload of kids.

An officer in the 124th Military Intelligence Battalion said a
captured Iraqi tank commander asked his U.S. interrogators several
times, Why are you killing us? All we were doing was going
home.

U.S. slaughter of Iraqi prisoners On February 27, the fourth day of
the U.S. ground invasion, a large group of Iraqi soldiers had
surrendered to a platoon in the 2-7 Battalion of the 24th Infantry
Division. One of the first vehicles to pull up was a bus filled with
wounded Iraqi soldiers. The bus was marked with a crescentthe
Arab equivalent of the Red Cross sign. Doctors and male nurses were
among the approximately 380 prisoners.

Specialist 4 Edward Walker was ordered to blow up weapons confiscated
from the Iraqi soldiers. Shortly after destroying a truck holding
these weapons, the platoon was abruptly ordered to move on. The
U.S. GIs, greatly outnumbered by the Iraqis, left after giving them
surrender leaflets printed in Arabic. The papers promised that those
who gave up would live to see their families again. Lt. Kirk Allen,
the platoon commander, notified the battalion's operations
headquarters of the exact location of the Iraqi hospital bus.

As the confiscated weapons were destroyed in a massive explosion,
according to Walker, several U.S. Bradley vehicles, armed with
chain-driven machine guns capable of firing up to a thousand rounds a
minute, rolled onto the scene. The high-intensity weapons opened up.

'They knew there were prisoners there' Walker, who was
convinced all the prisoners were mowed down, said the Bradleys also
fired on him and the other GIs who were in a marked Humvee. They
knew there were prisoners there. They knew they were unarmed, said
Walker. They knew the hospital bus was there, and they knew we were
blowing the truck up.

Walker left the military in 1991, not permitted by the authorities at
Fort Leonard Wood to reenlist after spilling the beans on the killing.

Another military engagement involving McCaffrey's troops from the
124th Military Intelligence Battalion occurred one day after the
cease-fire. A ground-radar surveillance team joined a platoon of
scouts who discovered a cache of Iraqi weapons at a deserted
schoolhouse near Highway 8.

Steven Larimore, a sergeant who headed a brigade assigned to the
platoon, said his men noticed a group of villagers walking in the
area. One guy had a white bedsheet on a stick, Larimore
stated. Out of the blue sky, some guy from where we're sitting
begins shooting at the Iraqis. Other machine guns opened fire. In
less than three or four minutes some 20 Iraqi civilians were mowed
down.

Liberal reporter Hersh denounces the U.S.-organized atrocities carried
out after the cease-fire under McCaffrey's command, but says
little about the brutal bombing campaign and the final ground assault
by the U.S. forces until thena war that was completely
bipartisan.

But the events of March 2 were a continuation of the total war
approach unleashed by the imperialist rulers on the Iraqi people,
culminating with the annihilation of tens of thousands fleeing on the
highway from Kuwait City to Basra.

During this onslaught, described by pilots as a turkey shoot,
U.S. military forces bombed the front and back of Iraqi convoys,
trapping thousands of vehicles in a killing box. A reporter for
the London Independent who visited the scene of the carnage wrote,
I lost count of the Iraqi corpses crammed into the smouldering
wreckage or slumped face down in the sand.

Far from being a rogue officer, McCaffrey simply carried out the
Powell doctrinenamed for Colin Powell, chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff at the timeof using maximum force at the
outset of a war to minimize U.S. casualties.

Do we understand that when we use military force decisively, we are
actually killing people and breaking up their equipment? McCaffrey
insisted in an interview published in the May 29 issue of
Newsweek. Do you understand that when you actually apply power, you
don't want a fair fight?

One fact Hersh does not report is that during the murderous Desert
Storm assault, the U.S. army literally buried alive thousands of Iraqi
soldiers in their trenches.

On February 24-25, 1991, three U.S. army brigades used tanks equipped
with plows to fill in with sand 70 miles of six-foot-deep trenches
defended by more than 8,000 Iraqi soldiers on the Saudi-Iraq border.

McCaffrey came under investigation after the war when an officer in
his unit filed a complaint about his post-cease-fire
operations. Military investigators filed a secret report and
exonerated McCaffrey in 1991.

McCaffrey was promoted to four-star general in 1994 and served as
commander of the U.S. military forces in Latin America. President
William Clinton named him White House drug czar two years
later. Today he is directly involved in Washington's escalating
military intervention in Colombia, which is being waged under the
banner of fighting drug traffickers intertwined with the fight
against terrorism.

The U.S.-organized massacre in Iraq was not an aberration or an
excess. It was the product of the drive by the U.S. ruling families
to defend their declining capitalist world order. The Gulf War
announced subsequent military assaults like the U.S.-led war against
Yugoslavia.

One of the best explanations of these developments can be found in New
International no. 7, which features the article Opening Guns of
World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq, by Jack Barnes.